Tag: MVC

Update. I’ve uploaded a skeleton project about the stuff in this post to Github. The presentation that I gave on this at Berlin Startup Culture on May 21st can be found here.

The server side code in the Localstream platform is a mix of Jruby and Java code. Over the past few months, I’ve gained a lot of experience using the two together and making the most of idioms and patterns in both worlds.

Ruby purist might wonder why you’d want to use Java at all. Likewise, Java purists might wonder why you’d waste your time doing Jruby at all instead of more hipster friendly languages such as Scala, Clojure, or Kotlin. In this article I want to steer clear of that particular topic and instead focus on more productive things such as what we use for deployment, dependency management, dependency injection, configuration, and logging. Also it is an opportunity to introduce two of my new Github projects:

The Java ecosystem provides a lot of good, very well supported technology. This includes the jvm itself but also libraries such as Google’s guava, misc. Apache frameworks such as httpclient, commons-lang, commons-io, commons-compress, the Spring framework, icu4j, and many others. Equivalents exist for Ruby, but mostly those equivalents leave a lot to be desired in terms of features, performance, design, etc. It didn’t take me long to conclude that a lot of the ruby stuff out there is sub-standard and not quite up to my level of expectations. That’s why I use Jruby instead of Ruby: it allows me to get the best of both worlds. The value of ruby is in its simplicity and the language. The value of Java is access to an enormous amount of good software. Jruby allows me to have both.